President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” targets the Smithsonian Institution — which has, he contends, “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
This was the 105th of 107 executive orders Trump has signed in the first 70 days of his second term in the White House. No other president has more aggressively used executive orders.
Darkness pervades this executive order, a darkness that follows Trump wherever he goes and whatever he says. To him, America is a densely wooded forest filled with vicious enemies. In Trump’s first inaugural address, the darkness descended on the nation. It was midnight in America.
Rodney Kennedy
He spoke of “American carnage.” On the campaign trail and in office, his public emotions are gloomy and sad — anger, disgust, revenge, frustration. His rhetoric is defensive and threatening. He appeals to the fearful side of America. He spreads fear as if he were the prince of darkness.
There’s a paranoia in a president who insists on scaring the hell out of people and other nations but doesn’t want history teachers to tell the stories of America’s many flaws. America’s “racist, sexist, oppressive and flawed” history can’t be erased by a presidents’ executive order.
Attack on American history
The Smithsonian Institute houses the “world’s largest museum, education and research complex.” It is the beating heart of American history and artifacts. The purpose of the Smithsonian is to “help with the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
“An attack on the Smithsonian is an attack on American history.”
Thus, an attack on the Smithsonian is an attack on American history. That is, an attack on history as it really is, not as MAGA wants it to be.
Historian John Fea notes Trump’s executive order on the Smithsonian doesn’t have much to do with history. In my view, it has everything to do with MAGA ideology and is a direct assault on our American story orchestrated by the architects of a right-wing revisionist history of America.
Trump signed the order, but the people pulling the strings here are MAGA evangelicals.
Installation at Smithsonian Museum of African American History (Photo by Mark Wingfield)
Trump falsely claims there has been a “concerted and widespread” effort over the past decade to rewrite American history. He misinforms by charging historians with replacing “objective facts” with a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth,” adding that it casts the “founding principles” of the United States in a “negative light.”
In reality, we have been moving toward more accurate telling of our national story — but those narratives challenge the white male supremacy of the MAGA vision. As always, Trump accuses others of doing the very thing he is doing.
Trump departs the territory of rational thought with this broadside of hyperbole: “Our mission is to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes and the nobility of the American character. We must clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms and teach our children the magnificent truth about our country. We want our sons and daughters to know that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”
He’s like a kid asking for a story at bedtime: “Tell only the good parts, Paw Paw!”
With this executive order, Trump attacks the citadel of American history. The Smithsonian is the Fort Knox of history — the storage facilities of the “true gold” of the American story. It is synonymous with history.
Two dates that matter
Sixty years ago, social studies teachers often required students to know dates. My teachers loaded my mind with facts and dates, but what I loved about history were the stories. Dates provide the boundaries for our stories.
Well, in this cultural war, there are dates of significance: 1619 and 1776.
The New York Times 1619 Project opens American history with the arrival of the first slaves. The 1619 Project is a Pulitzer Prize-winning project hated by MAGA. The bold words beginning the project set the tone: “In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”
Trump blasted the 1619 Project, along with Critical Race Theory, as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that if not removed will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.” In response, he created the 1776 Commission in an effort to re-establish “patriotic education” in America’s schools.
Trump formed the 1776 Commission to give an alternative history. This commission did not include one single historian whose work focuses on U.S. history. Instead, the commission’s ranks were filled with ultra-conservative evangelicals from Hillsdale College and College of the Ozarks President Jerry Davis.
“Trump formed the 1776 Commission to give an alternative history.”
The report is so poorly written and chock-full of errors and “beliefs without history,” that historian David Blight tweeted: “I have read as much as I can stomach of the 1776 report. It is the product of allowing an array of viciously right-wing, willfully ignorant people to have way too much power. Beliefs devoid of history. I feel so uncomfortable even bringing attention to this mess.”
Historian William V. Trollinger did read the entire report. Here is his response: “The first nine pages consists of a mind-numbing paean to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, highlighting what the authors see as their ‘universal principles,’ such as ‘human equality, the requirement for government by consent, and the securing of natural rights.’
“But it is in the next 11 pages that the authors get down to the task with which they had been charged, that is, to ‘enable a rising generation to understand the … accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring and ennobling’ history of the United States.’”
Installation at the Smithsonian Museum of African American History (Photo by Mark Wingfield)
American exceptionalism
We know all the signs of an approaching fascism in America. We are not blind to the anti-democracy strategies of Trumpism. Now, more than ever we need to listen to our historians because when we don’t know our history we are condemned to repeat it.
And if and when it is 1933 again, the new fascists, namely the Republican Party, will have a dysfunctional Constitution to exploit. The ridiculously undemocratic U.S. Senate and House, both controlled by the Republicans, seem hellbent on enabling Trump’s worst inclinations to thwart democracy.
The ideology providing the fuel for Trump’s attack includes American exceptionalism, propaganda disguised as history, and a nostalgia for a golden age.
The aim here is an evangelical whitewashed American history: a pure white America with no warts or scabs, no Indians, Hispanics or immigrants, and especially no African Americans (except as contented slaves), just a land of great fortune and white harmony. That is their “American exceptionalism.”
“The aim here is an evangelical whitewashed American history.”
In his executive order aimed at the Smithsonian, Trump hails the glory of American exceptionalism. He is in tune with the evangelical belief that American Christians have a righteousness not available to people of other nations and creeds. As Robert Jeffress puts it in his annual Fourth of July sermon: “America was not founded as a Muslim nation …. a Hindu nation …. a nation neutral to Christianity. America was founded as a Christian nation.”
Sounding like a prosperity gospel preacher, Trump proclaims, “I’m going to make our country rich again. … I make this promise: We will make America strong again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again.”
Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space (Smithsonian photo)
Rhetorical scholar Jennifer R. Mercieca says, “Appeals to American exceptionalism rely on Americans’ pride and their desire to believe that their nation is the best among others, that it is chosen by God, and that it has a heroic destiny to spread democracy and enlightenment throughout the world.”
Trump’s use of the exceptionalism trope encourages his acolytes to behave in even more obnoxious ways.
In a cringeworthy outburst, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was asked a question by a British reporter, Martha Kelner. Her reply to the reporter: “I don’t give a crap about your opinion or your reporting. Why don’t you go back to your country where you have a major migrant problem.”
Trump’s overall strategy is built largely on the back of white supremacy, is overly focused on erasing the voices of others and intends, through executive orders, to make America white again. The current efforts of the administration to eliminate any person, narrative, history, art or performance that suggests DEI make clear the design of white supremacy. Trump enshrines propaganda over education, celebrity populism over scholarship and racist ideology over human rights.
“Trump’s overall strategy is built largely on the back of white supremacy.”
Now he seeks to do the same to the Smithsonian and the National Zoo. The National Zoo? Perhaps the apian species will be removed to erase all mention of our evolutionary beginnings.
Fea writes: “This sounds like Trump wants to turn the Smithsonian museums into ‘Make America Great Again’ shrines by whitewashing American history. He wants these museums to be centers of government propaganda, not history.”
Oh, and put back those Confederate monuments! The Lost Cause rides again.
Historians are not propagandists
History is not propaganda except in fascist, dictatorship nations. Russia, China and Hungary are three of the most notorious modern-day examples. No freedom of the press. No voice for dissidents. The party line is the only line.
Historians are educators, not propagandists. Yet in Trump’s world, history is never past; it can always be rewritten with propaganda.
In this he follows and appeals to the evangelicals who are his most loyal base.
Refusing to deal with a changing world by engaging a more diverse society, evangelicals have retreated into nostalgia. Instead of responding to cultural change by trying to reclaim a world that is disappearing and never coming back, evangelicals attempt the re-creation of the “good old days” through executive fiat.
African Americans are not afflicted with the illusion of nostalgia. Neither are Native Americans. Neither is the LGBTQ community.
Can you imagine a Black man saying, “The best time to be Black in America was during the lynching era!” Or a gay person saying, “It was great being in the closet!”
There was no Golden Age. No wonder Trump is the “gold-gilded” president who never met a piece of furniture, artwork, balcony or room he didn’t want to cover with gold gilding. And gilding is not even real gold. Even Trump’s decorations are fake.
We cannot trust Trump. But we can trust our historians. They are the prophets of our age — the people who speak truth to history. They sing the songs of democracy, scream the pain and oppression of others and dance with the truth in the dark.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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